Augmented Agents
by LatwPIAT
Summary: FEMA requests for Maj. Kusanagi to help UNATCO catch terrorists. They end up in France. One-shot.
1. DEUS EX Emergence

"You're sending me to the US?" Maj. Motoko Kusanagi asked her superior, Daisuke Aramaki, with a hint, and just a hint, of surprise.

"It wasn't my intention, but the Prime Minister insisted;" he asnwered "all the documents were backlogged and Section 6 had already taken care of the paperwork - there was little I could do," 

"Strange as it may seem," the Major said under her breath "I guess you also have superiors..." 

"When do I leave?" asked Maj. Kusanagi, a little louder " - and why does the..." she paused as she reminded herself, as one often must, that no nation was a single coherent structure. 

"FEMA," Aramaki replied. 

"thank you," the Major mumbled "...FEMA want me?" she completed her question; it was more of a question than she had thought; Section 9 has worked with the CIA in the past, and the JSDF and the US Armed Forces were allied like spear and shield in the hands of a trained warrior, but the _Federal Emergency Management Agency_? A small echo, not quite a whisper, passed through her brain. 

"All I know is that they asked for you by name," Aramaki answered, and met her suspicious half-glare, "I know Major, I'm as concerned as you are about this," 

"As to answer your previous question," he reverted "your flight leaves 22:00 tonight," 

The Major simply lifted an eyebrow - _Short notice,_ she thought, _Gah! This means I can't go crazy tonight - they're going to (want to) kill me!_

**DEUS EX/Emergence**

"Is your room safe now, Major?" Batou asked, their mindlink stretched across the pacific ocean. It transmitted as light from Japan, running along the sea-floor until it reached a Japanese fishing trawler just outside US territorial claims that didn't quite as much trawl for fish as just sitting calmly in the waters, letting the (rather high, at this time of year) waves rock the ship up and down in a not-so-gently fashion while letting the fiberoptic cable dangle on the sea floor. In this boat, of which there were many, and quite a few of them not owned by Japan, the optic messages would be encoded into a tightbeam radio-message and broadcast to the relevant location, in this case a hotel in New York. 

"Yes. I've set up a barrier-mask to fool the audial bugs," she replied "and there's so much encrypted traffic in the air our transmissions will be concealed, but I can't do much about the cameras without evoking suspicion, except spend inordinate amounts of time in the shower," 

They say you can't transmit a lewd look on a **[VOICE ONLY]** line.  
They are wrong. 

Then again, it is an equally un-difficult feat to send a sharp stare back. 

"There's one thing that's bugging me though" Maj. Kusanagi said, not stressing any of the syllables in a humorous way because linguistics doesn't quite work like that " - it's not the US' MO to use bugs like these,"

"Laser microphones?" Batou asked. The Major lifted a curtain, ostensibly looking out at the street below - in all actuality, she switched filters on her prosthetic eyes, to more easily pick up lasers passing through an active medium. - The CIA, and later the FBI and other US intelligence agencies, had gained a reputation for relying heavily on _human_ resources; if they really wanted to place surveillance in a room, they'd place a team on the job (for they commanded vast personnel resources) but whoever these people were (one were tempted to refer to them simply as _**them**_) they _hadn't_.

And this was worrying.

"Feeling nervous?" Batou asked.

"Hardly," she replied. "Cautious, on the other hand... - I'm grateful that the Chief have set you to take a closer look at this,"

**12**

"JC" Denton knocked on the door to the hotel room; 17th floor, Room 23. A cyborg woman, in her... 20's? - It was hard to tell with full-conversion cyborgs, but for police purposes appearances mattered just as much as actual age did. - opened the door. She was dressed, like him, in an inconspicuous attire assigned by FEMA; a black incognito suit, although the same could not be said about her brightly purple hair. (although that was slightly more common in the US than it had been in Switzerland) _Then again, my eyes glow..._ JC reminded himself.


	2. DEUS EX Conspiracy

**DEUS EX/Conspiracy**

Maj. Kusanagi stood in the entrance hall to the _Aéroport Paris-Charles de Gaulle_, ostensibly checking the flight-times of a flight she didn't actually plan to take - she masqueraded, to use a vaguely French-sounding word, as a Japanese socialite tourist, the daughter of a corporate head that didn't actually exist, much less the actual company, except as an electronic spectre in a shared database - fancy sunglasses, dyed hair (which was going to take _months_ to get out, as her hair didn't actually grow; it might actually be easier to just have it replaced, she thought) and a bag filled with expensive label clothes (stolen, uh, _confiscated_ from the DuClare mansion) and very, _very_ bad literature of the type that people whose brains were't computer-augmented or even working very hard read because everyone else they know claimed to have done.

It wasn't a perfect disguise; close inspection would reveal that the spines of the books had been broken the wrong way, not in line with how anyone would actually read the book, and the worn edges were a superficial camouflage at best. The stolen - _there is no way around it_, the Major thought (although with her brains scattered all over a Paris boulevard the previous owner was hardly in a position to complain) - clothing didn't quite fit her right and never would, and Maj. Kusanagi could never, _ever_ pass through check-in, on account of her shell containing several hundred kilograms of illegal hardware - but that was hardly a problem; it wasn't her intention to ever have her non-existent fake passport checked, and she wasn't here to leave the country in any case; she was here to _stop_ certain people from leaving the country.

"Mr. Denton," she said over a heavily encrypted line "are you in position?"

"In position and ready," he replied "This area is _dense_ with MJ12 patrols; they're mostly armed with M27 9 millimetre caseless and shotguns, but some carry assault rifles with 7.62 NATO rounds, so, uh, ten-zero."

A small icon lit up in the Major's peripheral vision, indicating an attached document; a map of the airport, detailing all those Gendarme and MJ12 patrols they hadn't caught on their recon of the area, and, just as importantly, those patrols that were missing according to their initial recon.

"Thanks," she mumbled over the line.

**12**

JC Denton moved stealthily along the black airport tarmac, hidden in the nightly shadows of airport vehicles, until he reached an MJ12 operational outpost, which in reality meant it was little more than a thin tent with an encrypted optical landline, a cardboard box of extra ammunition and, most importantly to the guards in the French chilly night, a coffee machine.

Through careful observation, JC had noticed that no patrols passed through the area - it was an isolated sentry outpost of only three men. _Perfect._

Gunfire would draw too much attention, so he placed his suppressed pistol back into his holster - it's internal silencer would necessarily actually be silent, but a guard hearing his fellow sentry's cranium slam into the back of the helmet before slumping like a sack of potatoes to the ground was very obviously _not_, and he couldn't rely on being able to place two consecutive shots perfectly.

Instead, he opened his backpack and withdrew a large weapon, the bastard child of a shotgun and a pepperbox gun, though it only had a single barrel, and only one shot - it was commonly known as a riot-gun, though it's official name was "Less-lethal Compressed Airblast Ring Vortex Rifle," but "L'LCARVR"was not suited for anyone but the Servants of Cthulhu.

Guard One, to give the faceless (in the sense that he wore a balaclava against the cold) man an equally bland name, drew a cigarette from his friend's (Guard Two to continue this newfound tradition) pack and lit it with a lighter. As he drew the toxic gasses into his lungs, which didn't really matter because he was going to replace them soon, he stared up at the black, stary night - in moments like these he felt that he was really part of something great; something big - a New World Order, really not much worse than the Old World Order under Weishaupt's Illuminati; it wasn't as much a conspiracy to take over the world, he reasoned to himself, as a conspiracy to replace the old, traditionalist conservatives who _had_ taken over the world with their disillusioned younger brothers; a progressive radical conspiracy, if you want.

The illusion of tranquillity and poignancy was broken by the loud boom of an approaching airliner, cruising down towards the end of the _Aéroport Paris-Charles de Gaulle_, not helped by the torus-shaped airblast that slammed into him, knocking him and his friend off their feet - and the air out of their lungs.

JC Denton pocketed the riot-gun and walked over to the two heaped guards, his suppressed pistol drawn. The vortex airblast carried a potent incapacitating agent with it, to subdue the targets, but it always paid to be cautious, especially if they, like him, had micromachines in their blood that targeted and neutralized chemical weapons. They hadn't, and before they could regain conciousness, he had placed a small black peripheral in their neural interfaces, turning them, effectively, quadriplegic.

Then, he flipped his augmented vision to far-infrared. The clear, digitally cleaned thermal images flooded over his eyes, turning his world blue, yellow and red; the hot signature of the third guard, at his landline computer and completely unaware, the sound of the riot-gun masked by the much louder 747. JC cut through the thin fabric of the tent and approached the guard from behind.

With a knife at the man's (no, wait, this was actually a woman) throat, he asked dryly and relatively politley:

"Spill the guts on this operation, or I spill your's"

**12**

"Is the helicopter here?" Maj. Kusanagi asked Batou across half the world, using the aforementioned fake fishing trawlers in international waters as a relay.

"Soon, Major," Batou replied "It's a stealthed Botanachi single-rotor, built for medium-heavy cargo loads," he explained, though the definition of medium-heavy had changed somewhat over the past few decades as the average elite soldier suddenly became up to six times as heavy as before. "It'll rendevouz with a JMSDF _Yukikaze_-class submarine once you've retrieved your target. Oh, and Ishikawa wants you to know it's a bitch to fly-by-wire in these winds,"

"...I'll buy him a whiskey later," she mumbled. "Why a medium-heavy? We're only going to be three people and we need speed more than armour," she asked.

"Oh," Batou laughed, "You're going to like this!"

"Cut the "surprise" crap and get to the point," she transmitted sharply. All she got back was a single attachment.

They say a picture is worth more than a thousand words - in this care it wasn't worth more than a sentence, (and not a verbose one, at that) but the effect it had on Maj. Kusanagi made a Japanese socialite tourist suddenly mouth an intrigued "Oooooh!" in the middle of a busy airport. For a moment, she smirked.

**12**


End file.
